Qualcomm has announced what is technically a new chipset today in the upcoming Snapdragon 850 - and it's probably not what you think. While it could power your next laptop (maybe), you almost certainly won't be seeing the Snapdragon 850 in your next phone.

Qualcomm seems to be changing its processor naming strategy once again, because logically, you'd think the Snapdragon 850 would be the next iteration of its flagship mobile platform, but in fact it's just a Snapdragon 845 designed with laptop and similar form factors specifically in mind. What's that mean? It's not clear exactly, but if you look at the specifications, you'll see a Snapdragon 845 - Kryo 385 CPU cores, Adreno 630 GPU, Hexagon 685 DSP, 1.2Gbps LTE, and Spectra 280 image signal processors.

Last week, we attended an event at Qualcomm's corporate headquarters in San Diego to test out the company's latest high-end smartphone chip, the Snapdragon 845. We ran some benchmarks and ate some food. There was probably more eating than benchmarking, if I'm honest.

Full disclosure: Qualcomm paid to fly me out to San Diego, put me up in a nice little hotel for three nights next to their campus, and fed me lots of food and bought me lots of drinks. Of particular note: some pretty delicious hot wings at midnight.

Introduction

First and foremost, let me be clear that we place essentially zero weight on benchmark results as a reflection of real-world performance or user experience.

Qualcomm detailed its next-generation chipset, the Snapdragon 845, at a press conference in Hawaii this morning. The chip features a ground-up redesign of the company's Kryo CPU (now the Kryo 385) and Adreno GPU, marking a major evolution of the platform. The changes to the new Adreno 630 GPU will result in 30% faster graphics performance, and Qualcomm anticipates the platform as a whole will be up to 30% more power-efficient than Snapdragon 835, a chip that has already proven to be excellent on battery life.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 845 today at as press conference in Hawaii, the next generation of the company's flagship mobile processor. As with the outgoing Snapdragon 835, Samsung is the fabrication partner, and the 845 will be built on the company's 10nm process.

Full disclosure: Qualcomm paid to fly me to Hawaii, put me up at the Grand Wailea resort for three (correction: four nights, I regret the error) nights, fed me breakfast this morning (the coffee was OK) and a bunch of Mai Tais and little beef taquitos last night. The taquitos were pretty good and the Mai Tais were solid.